Of all the propaganda, misinformation, and claptrap thrown at the public to
mobilize support for the preemptive strike on Iraq, a William
Safire op-ed in the New York Times of March 6th, 2003 stands out for me
as especially grotesque. More than two years after its publication, Safire’s
“kill first, ask questions later” approach to the invasion serves
as a classic example of the degeneration of establishment punditry into a kind
of crass, Soviet-style apparatchik agitprop of the Cold War era. Impatient with
those who dared question the wisdom of a war of choice, Safire wrote:

"Nor should we indulge in placing second thoughts first: How much
will it cost? How many will be killed? How long will it take? Will it kill the
snake of terror or only poke it? Will everybody thank us afterward? Where's
the guarantee of total success? Too cautious to oppose, these questioners delay
action by demanding to know what they know is unknowable."

In contrast to apparatchik agitprop, Norman Solomon in his new book presents
us with a journalism of conscience. War
Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning us to Death (John Wiley
& Sons, Inc.) chronicles in often painful detail the myriad
ways in which politicians, pundits, and a lapdog press preach war is peace,
freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. Solomon, the founder and Executive
Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy,
writes with a moral fervor that calls to mind the best work of George Orwell,
I.F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Like these
principled critics of state power, Solomon has a knack for discovering and exposing
the debasement of the English language as it occurs in an official government
pronouncement and the punditry that promotes it.

War Made Easy is organized around 17 chapters bearing titles that literally
come from the pro-war spin machine: (1) “America is a Fair and Noble
Superpower;” (2) “Our Leaders Will Do Everything They Can to Avoid
War;” (3) “Our Leaders Would Never Tell Us Outright Lies;”
(4) “This Guy Is a Modern-Day Hitler;” (5) “This Is About
Human Rights;” (6) “This Is Not at All About Oil or Corporate Profits;”
(7) They Are The Aggressors, Not Us;” (8) If This War Is Wrong, Congress
Will Stop It;” (9) “If This War Is Wrong, the Media Will Tell Us;”
(10) “Media Coverage Brings War into Our Living Rooms;” (11) “Opposing
the War Means Siding with the Enemy;” (12) “This Is a Necessary
Battle in the War on Terrorism;” (13) “What the U.S. Government
Needs Most Is Better P.R.;” (14) “The Pentagon Fights Wars as Humanely
as Possible;” (15) “Our Soldiers Are Heroes, Theirs Are Inhuman;”
(16) “America Needs the Resolve to Kick the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’;”
(17) “Withdrawal Would Cripple U.S. Credibility”. Significantly,
these pro-war commonplaces are trotted out not just on Fox News, but also on
all establishment media, especially broadcast. Summarizing a Fairness and Accuracy
in Reporting study of 1,617 on-camera sources appearing on the evening newscasts
of six U.S. television networks during the first three weeks following the March,
2003 invasion of Iraq, Solomon writes: “Nearly two-thirds of all sources,
64 percent, were prowar, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Antiwar
voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources
and only 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as
likely to see a prowar source as one who was antiwar; counting only U.S. guests,
the ratio increases to 25 to 1.”

The book closes with a plea for citizen activism rooted in conscience: “Conscience
is not on the military’s radar screen, and it’s not on our television
screen. But government officials and media messages do not define the limits
and possibilities of conscience. We do.”

Right here in the Fox Valley, a new politics of conscience is emerging as citizens
try to get an Iraq War troop withdrawal referendum placed on the April, 2006
ballot. In Oshkosh, activists associated with the Winnebago
Peace and Justice Center, the Lake
Winnebago Green Party, and other organizations in late August launched a
signature gathering drive to get this referendum question on the ballot: "Should
the United States begin an immediate withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, beginning
with the National Guard and Reserves?"

True to form, Gannett’s Oshkosh Northwestern bashed
the referendum drive even before it started. They argued that last November’s
elections somehow already represented a referendum on the war, and that “the
referendum question is a somewhat clunky way to persuade people of a point.”
In contrast, referendum activists believe that the Iraq War is a clunky (and
catastrophic) way of persuading people that the doctrine of preemption as practiced
by the current administration has a place in American foreign policy.

This Sunday night, the cable TV channel C-SPAN 2 will air a talk that I gave
about the themes of my new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Sunday, Aug. 28, at 11 p.m. ET

(Repeated on Monday, Aug. 29, at 6:30 a.m. ET)

The program -- including Q&A -- lasts about 90 minutes. Audio from the event
(which was a benefit for Global Exchange and Media Alliance) has been posted
at: http://alternet.org/multimedia/24486

“War Made Easy” was published last month and has gone into a second
printing. The book is doing well, despite the fact that only one daily newspaper
in the country has reviewed it (the Los Angeles Times, review posted at <http://www.coldtype.net/war3.html>).
Whatever you could do to let others know about the book would be very helpful.
Excerpts and other information are posted at: www.WarMadeEasy.com